


found you through bathroom graffiti

by slugboy



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M, Prompt Fic, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:27:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25426882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slugboy/pseuds/slugboy
Summary: Richie decides to write his biggest secret on the stall in the men's bathroom. He doesn't expect to get a reply.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 21
Kudos: 372





	found you through bathroom graffiti

**Author's Note:**

> this is based on the prompt "secret" from @ittalentshow on twitter! hope you enjoy :)

Richie holds onto his knees as he tries to catch his breath, frozen on the lid of the toilet seat in the last stall of the men’s restroom. He tries to focus on the feel of the band-aid on his knee instead of Henry Bowers’ voice in his head, shouting slurs and threats as he tries to outrun him. 

Richie thinks of Bowers’ gang of greasy punks, following him wherever he goes. Hockstetter takes just as much pleasure in inflicting pain as Bowers did, and Criss idolized Bowers with blind admiration. But Belch, as disgusting as he was, was the only one out of the group that Richie ever had any hope for redemption. Richie could always tell when Belch started to get apprehensive about how far Bowers would take things—but he never spoke up. Too afraid of Bowers, Richie supposes. That’s one thing they have in common.

The bell for next class rings, and Richie lets out a breath. Bowers should be in class now (everyone knows he’s failing and can’t afford to get held back another year, if his old man has anything to say about it). Richie lets his legs slide to the floor, removing his hands from his knees to instead grip at the backpack in his lap. He swallows down the bile that threatens to rise up in his throat.

He takes this moment of peace to scan his eyes around the stall. Every wall is covered in graffiti, slurs and phallic doodles decorating every inch. He spots an empty space amongst the half-assed vandalism, and stares at it for a long, considering moment. 

Bowers’ voice comes back into his mind, and Richie’s jaw clenches. In a moment of idiotic determination, he reaches into his backpack and maneuvers through the mess of crumpled papers and unfinished lunches until his hand grasps onto a pen. He uncaps the red sharpie with his teeth and brings it towards the empty space, stopping just before it hits the surface.

Bowers thinks he can tell the world who Richie is before he can even do it himself. Well. This is Richie spilling his secret on his own terms. Even if it is just graffiti on a bathroom stall.

Richie brings the marker down and writes down his biggest secret for the whole world (or more accurately, the occupants of the men’s room) to see.

_i’m gay_

Straight to the point. It’s messy in his panicked hurry to get the words out, almost illegible—although maybe that’s God’s way of saving Richie’s ass from anyone actually being able to decipher what his awful chicken scratch says. Richie caps the marker and shoves it back into his backpack, making quick work of exiting the bathroom in the small chance that someone comes in, takes one look at him, and figures out what he’s hiding.

He doesn’t go back to that specific stall for days. He feels like as soon as he makes eye contact with the words he wrote, Bowers will kick the door in, shouting, ‘ _I fucking knew it was you!_ ’ It’s illogical, of course he knows that, but it doesn’t mean the fear isn’t real. 

So, he stays away from the stall. He’s thought about it, though, as much as he tries not to. He wonders if anyone has seen it yet, if anyone has started a rumor about who could have written it. He made it small on purpose so it would be hard to spot, but it wasn’t impossible. 

He’s finally forced to go back to that stall after three days of careful avoidance. He asks to use the restroom during AP Gov, which his teacher gives him an unamused look for because she _knows_ that he doesn’t actually have to use the restroom—he just wants to sit with his phone on the toilet until half the class is done—but she allows him to leave anyway, too tired to put up a fight in her old age.

He regrets the decision as soon as he walks into the men’s room and sees every urinal and stall occupied except for the very last one. He hesitates, debating if he should just turn around and go back, but ultimately decides that he’d rather deal with this than Miss Carmichael’s incomprehensible lectures.

With a looming sense of dread, Richie enters the stall. He takes out his phone quickly so as to avoid accidentally looking at where he knows the words ‘ _I’m gay_ ’ are printed for the eyes of God himself to see and cast judgment. 

It doesn’t last long. It’s like telling someone not to think of a purple elephant—now that the thought is in his head, he can’t help it. So he looks.

He spots it immediately. Not just the incriminating words he wrote down before, but new words, directly below his own. A response.

_Me too._

All Richie can do is stare. The words are written with a black pen—possibly a sharpie like Richie’s. Neat lettering. All caps. One ‘o’ is smaller than the other. 

He slowly puts his phone in his pocket without drawing his eyes away, studying the two simple words with a sacred sort of intensity. Someone wrote that. Someone sat directly where Richie is sitting now and responded to him. Was this person’s hand trembling when they wrote the words down, like Richie’s were? Or did the steady lines of each letter reflect a certain amount of confidence in this person that Richie could only hope to feel when he admitted such a dooming secret?

Richie fumbles for his bag and whips out his red sharpie.

_i’m scared_

He can’t get himself to write any more than that, but it’s enough. It’s all he wants to say. 

He leaves the stall, praying that this wasn’t some bully yanking his chain, having a laugh about the queer kid coming out via bathroom graffiti because he’s too cowardly to do it anywhere else.

He gets through half of his next period before someone snaps at him for jiggling his leg so hard that it shook her desk, and his hand shoots up to ask to go to the bathroom. He speed walks the whole way there, and deflates when he doesn’t see a response to his message yet. Of course there isn’t—not enough time has passed for them to possibly get a chance to write back—but it’s still disappointing. He sighs, and resolves to wait until tomorrow to see if there’s any reply.

When he lies in bed that night, it takes him over two hours to finally fall asleep, because his mind can’t stop racing. He can’t stop thinking about those two words. _Me too._

Who could have possibly been stupid enough—or brave enough—to respond to his message? And if their responding to him was stupid, then what does that make him since he wrote back? 

_A gay fool hoping to find some support through fucking bathroom graffiti_ , he thinks, before he finally drifts off into a dreamless sleep.

The next day, he waits until fourth block to finally go to the bathroom, hoping that he’s given his little vandal buddy enough time to respond. He enters the stall and locks it behind him, holding his breath when he sees new words written below his last message in that familiar, all caps lettering.

_Don’t be. You have me._

Richie huffs out a breath, feeling his cheeks warm. How pathetic is he, getting flustered over some writing on a wall? He blows a stray piece of hair out of his eyes in irritation and pushes his glasses back up his nose from where they had begun to slip. Then, he brings out his marker and responds.

_how do i have you if i don’t know who you are?_

He leaves, skin buzzing. It’s Friday, which means he’ll have to wait the whole weekend before he can see the response. He occupies his time by not-so-discreetly peering at every boy’s paper in each one of his classes, studying their handwriting. Very few of them wrote in all caps, and the ones that did still didn’t quite match up with the mismatched sizes of vandal buddy’s O’s, or the swooping way they’d write their N’s without lifting the pen.

He spends his time at home debating whether or not he could get away with breaking into the school, just to check if his new friend had somehow responded in the time between Richie’s last message and now. Richie holds off on the breaking and entering, figuring that low-grade vandalism was the most he could handle on a criminal record.

On Monday, Richie heads straight to the bathroom before classes even begin, buzzing with too much energy to hold off until later. He’s surprised to see that his friend did, in fact, make it before him. When he enters the stall, he’s greeted with a lengthier response than usual, the words curving down a bit at the end as the writer tries to fit the words into the ever-shrinking amount of space they have left.

_I like to think the universe tends to make things work out as they should. You’ll meet me if you’re meant to._

Against all odds, Richie finds himself chuckling under his breath. He uncaps his red sharpie.

_pretentious fuck_ , he writes back, snorting.

He comes back to the stall at the end of the day, and sees a single short response, hastily written as if they were trying to be quick.

_Hahaha_

Richie smiles and brings out his sharpie, only to startle and drop it when he hears a voice clear next to him. _Shit_ , he thinks, turning around slowly. In his haste to respond to his mystery messenger, he had forgotten to close the stall door.

“Mr. Tozier,” the vice principal says.

“Shit,” Richie says aloud this time.

The vice principal holds out a slip of paper to Richie, and Richie takes the detention slip without a fuss, hanging his head as he leaves.

Opposed to what most people would believe, Richie doesn’t get detention often. Sure, he breaks the rules, as every kid does, but the teachers in Derry High rarely give enough of a shit to do anything about it. So he’s not exactly happy about getting detention. 

Thankfully, that doesn’t last for long.

The teacher in charge of detention that day is Mr. Teckler, who happens to be one of Richie’s favorites. He’s a mean looking geezer, but he always understands when Richie says he needs to twirl his pen or doodle on his paper in order to focus in class. He would even give Richie extra points whenever he left a drawing on the back of tests.

“Today you will all write an essay on the importance of respecting school property,” Mr. Teckler says. “It must be no less than a thousand words, and it must be handwritten. Pen is acceptable as long as it is legible.”

One of the other three students in the room raises her hand. “If it’s supposed to be handwritten, how are we supposed to know if it’s up to a thousand words?”

“Count,” he says.

Yes, he was one of Richie’s favorites. Didn’t mean he wasn’t still a bit of a dick, though.

Mr. Teckler leaves the room, and Richie immediately breathes out all of the tension in his body, sinking into his seat until his head hangs over the chair. He scans the area upside-down, his glasses slipping with the force of gravity, until he spots a boy in the back that catches his eye. Richie quickly straightens up in his seat, floundering a little because he still hasn’t learned how to control his too-long limbs. 

Richie takes another glance at the boy and comes to a decision. He’s not sure what it is about the kid—whether it’s his neatly combed hair or his tidy little unwrinkled polo shirt—but something in Richie whispers, _I need to annoy him._

The boy looks up and makes eye contact. He does a double take, not expecting someone to be staring right back at him. He stares at Richie for a second that feels much longer than it truly is. His nose crinkles and he huffs, looking down at his desk. 

Richie grins, delighted. He’s never been able to annoy someone without even _speaking_ to them before. 

Without giving it much thought, Richie leaves his desk and walks over to the boy, pulling up a chair and spinning it around until it’s backwards. He throws a leg over the side and plops down with a sigh, and the boy eyes him warily.

“Howdy,” Richie drawls in what he knows is a god awful Southern accent.

“We’re not supposed to talk,” the boy says back. Richie can only think about how much he likes the sound of his voice.

“Oh, c’mon, what’s the worst that can happen?” Richie insists. “We’re already in detention.”

“They could give us _more_ detention, shit for brains.”

Richie cackles at that, scooting closer to the boy. He’s never met someone who gave as good as he got—at least not without Richie getting his skull pounded into the ground a minute later.

“I’m Richie,” he says, lowering his face until his cheek rests on the back of the chair, looking up at the boy with a cheeky smirk.

“I don’t care.”

“I think you do.”

The boy blushes, and oh, okay, that wasn’t the reaction Richie had been expecting. The boy ignores him to instead take out a piece of paper and start writing with a flustered sort of fury.

“What are you doing?”

“The essay, dickhead! Don’t tell me you didn’t listen to a single thing the teacher said,” he says.

Richie laughs, ignoring the remark to instead lean over and peek at what the boy has written.

“Hey, write your own shit!” He hisses, but Richie has stopped listening.

The boy’s writing is familiar. Painfully familiar. He writes in black pen, with mismatched O’s and swooping N’s. Neat. All caps.

“What did you say you got detention for?” Richie says weakly, feeling as though the world was spinning far too fast, or perhaps not at all.

“I didn’t,” the boy snaps. Then he sighs and continues, “I got caught writing graffiti in the bathroom. Which is—fucking _stupid_ because _everyone_ does that shit.”

Richie hums, and even that sounds distant to his own ears, which at this point feel as though they have been stuffed with cotton. He can feel the sweat on his hands, and his heart feels like it’ll pound out of his chest, but somehow it’s good. Richie reaches into his backpack and takes out a pen. More specifically, his red sharpie. He had made sure to pick it up from the bathroom floor after the vice principal had startled him into dropping it. 

Richie debates writing on the boy’s paper for a single second before deciding it would be best to refrain, sure that the boy would legitimately bite his head off for ruining his essay. So he takes out a scrap piece of paper instead, wrinkled and torn but good enough for a few words, and writes.

_i guess the universe decided we were meant to meet._

Richie reads over the words a few times before hurriedly throwing the paper down on top of the boy’s and looking away, unable to watch his reaction. The boy makes a noise of complaint at the interruption, then his mouth audibly clacks shut as he reads what’s written on the paper. 

Richie finally musters the courage to look at him. The boy’s eyes are wide, a lovely pink blush painted on the apples of his cheeks. 

Finally, he looks up at Richie, and he lets out a breathy, “ _Oh._ ”

“Nice to finally meet you,” Richie says, mustering up a kind of confidence that he definitely doesn’t feel, but thinks he might be able to one day. “Can I have your name now?”

The boy takes a moment to speak. Then he smiles a shy little smile, and Richie feels his stomach swoop and all the butterflies flutter up into his throat.

He has a feeling that he’ll remember this exact moment many, many years from now. Maybe, if he’s very lucky, he’ll end up telling this story to his friends and family, in front of a whole crowd of witnesses, declaring a feeling he hasn’t felt yet but knows that he has the ability to. 

The boy finally responds. 

“Eddie,” he says. “My name is Eddie.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! you can find me @slugboytozier on twitter!


End file.
